by Chris Floyd
“How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home.”
Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”

Let’s be clear about one thing. Nothing that has happened in the past week — the mass destruction in the Mississippi Delta, the obliteration of the city of New Orleans, the murderous abandonment of thousands of people to death, chaos and disease will change the Bush Administration or American politics at all. Not one whit. The Bush Administration will not reverse its brutal policies; its Congressional rubber-stamps will not revolt against the White House; the national Democrats will not suddenly grow a spine. There will be no real change, and the bitter corrosion of injustice, indifference and inhumanity that is consuming American society will go on as before.
counterpunch.org

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When U.S. officials asked the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs said on Wednesday.

The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with the Bush administration’s ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said in separate telephone interviews.

“It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story,” said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors’ group that defends free expression.

U.S. newspapers, television outlets and Web sites have featured pictures of shrouded corpses and makeshift graves in New Orleans.

But on Tuesday, FEMA refused to take reporters and photographers along on boats seeking victims in flooded areas, saying they would take up valuable space need in the recovery effort and asked them not to take pictures of the dead.
reuters.myway.com

WASHINGTON, DC — Adding to the controversy regarding the Army Corps of Engineers diverting $250 million from the SELA (Southeast Louisiana) Urban Flood Control Program to Iraq and Halliburton reconstruction projects, is the revelation that FEMA outsourced hurricane recovery planning to the Baton Rouge-based consulting firm Innovative Emergency Management (IEM), Inc. to develop a “Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan for New Orleans & Southeast Louisiana.” The award was announced on June 3, 2004 on the firm’s web site but was taken down just as Hurricane Katrina’s winds and waves first started pounding New Orleans. It would now appear that the hurricane plan IEM and its team developed wasn’t worth a damned thing.

IEM’s team partners for the more than $500,000 contract are Dewberry of Arlington, VA, URS Corporation of San Francisco, and James Lee Witt Associates. Witt was FEMA Director under Bill Clinton. IEM’s president is Madhu Beriwal. The company was founded in 1985. Dewberry and URS are engineering firms. IEM is also a Defense Department contractor and has contracts with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) along with team members Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin.
globalresearch.ca

Los Angeles Times
WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States.

Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina’s destruction grew longer with each hour’s grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.

Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans’ flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long’s ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.
Full: informationclearinghouse.info

-Aaron Broussard, president Jefferson Parish council, MSNBC, TRANSCRIPT Meet the Press with Tim Russert, VIDEO: “Feds criticized for slow response,” and VIDEO: “She drowned Friday night,” September 4, 2005 (VIDEO Mirror)

“‘Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now,” he insisted. Broussard hinted that he thought President Bush should be held responsible, saying, ‘whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership.'”
-Newsmax, “La. Official: Feds ‘Murdered’ Flood Victims,” September 5, 2005

“Even though dry land routes exist leading out of the city, emergency officials continued to prevent able-bodied storm victims from trying to walk across the Crescent City Bridge, citing the dangers they said would be posed by an uncontrolled exit from the city. ‘The last thing we need is people walking an en masse exodus on the interstate,’ said Louisiana State Police Lt. Lawrence McLeary. ‘Number one, they could probably be in shock and need medical attention. We don’t know if they’re lawless going out of town and we don’t want them walking around wreaking havoc.'”
-James Janega and Howard Witt, “Help arrives, but many in New Orleans still wait for deliverance,” September 2, 2005

Female reporter: “Is it true that the levees were blown up on purpose?”
White House Press Bullshitter: “This is not the time or the place for questions like that!”
-Press Conference with Ex-President George Bush Sr. Sir Knight of the British Empire and Ex-President Bill Clinton-Blythe-Rockefeller IV, MSNBC Morning Show, September 5, 2005

“Repair crews have patched the ruptured levee along the 17th Street Canal and have begun pumping water from New Orleans, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Monday. Helicopters closed the approximately 300-foot breach by filling it with more than 200 15,000-pound sandbags [BUT PHOTO AND VIDEO SHOWED A SECTION LEFT OPEN]. Trucks also poured loads of fill dirt into the damaged section. Crews intentionally breached levees in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes Monday so that water would flow back into Lake Borgne, John Rickey, a corps spokesman said.”
-CNN, “Pumps begin to drain New Orleans,” September 5, 2005 (click for satellite images of all levee breaks)
piratenews.org

Lots more quotes and full Broussard transcript here.

Stung by criticism of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush yesterday promised to investigate his own administration’s emergency management, then readied a request for tens of billions of dollars for relief and cleanup.
washingtonpost.com

The headline for this story on prisonplanet.comreads, “Bush to Investigate Himself.”

From yesterday’s New York Times:“In a city riven by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout yesterday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee, and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants outright and a fourth in a later gunfight, the police said, adding that a fifth suspect had been wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.”

and today’s ‘numbing facts,’ since, clearly, yesterday’s were wrong, and featured ‘armed thugs’ instead of trigger-happy NOLA cops::

At least five people shot dead by police as they walked across a New Orleans bridge yesterday were contractors working for the US Defence department, according to a report by The Associated Press.

A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal, the new agency said, quoting a defence Department spokesman.

The contractors crossing the bridge to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain, in an operation to fix the 17th Street Canal, according to the spokesman.

The shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, across a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River.

Early on Sunday, Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley of New Orleans said police shot at eight people, killing five or six.

No other details were immediately available.
theaustraliannews.com

HOUSTON No one would accuse this city of being timid in the scramble to profit from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Oil services companies based here are already racing to carry out repairs to damaged offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, and the promise of plenty of work to do sent shares in two large companies, Halliburton and Baker Hughes, soaring to record levels last week. The Port of Houston is preparing for an increase in traffic as shippers divert cargo away from the damaged ports of New Orleans and Pascagoula, Mississippi.

With brio that might make an ambulance-chaser proud, one company, National Realty Investments is offering special financing deals “for hurricane survivors only,” with no down payments and discounted closing costs.

“It feels like the only things left in south Louisiana are snakes and alligators,” said John Olson, co-manager of Houston Energy Partners, a hedge fund that operates out of a skyscraper in the city center. “Houston is positioned for a boom.”

Perhaps no city in the United States is in a better spot to turn Katrina’s tragedy into opportunity. Long known for its commercial fervor, Houston, the largest city in the South with a metropolitan population of more than four million, has one of the busiest ports in the United States and remains unrivaled as a center for the energy industry.

Halliburton moved its headquarters to Houston from Dallas in 2003, joining dozens of companies based here that provide services for oil and natural gas producers.

Halliburton differs from many oil services companies in that it also does significant business with the federal government. Halliburton has a contract with the U.S. Navy, similar to its contracts in Iraq, that has already kept it busy after Hurricane Katrina. The company’s Kellogg, Brown & Root unit was doing repairs and cleanup at three naval facilities in Mississippi last week.

Executives at other Houston companies said they were wasting little time in carrying out repairs in the Gulf of Mexico, where at least 20 offshore rigs and platforms are believed to be damaged or destroyed. Tetra Technologies, which repairs old platforms in the Gulf of Mexico or decommissions them, had employees in a helicopter the day after the storm passed to survey the damage.

“I always hate to talk about positives in a situation like this, but this is certainly a growth business over the next 6 to 12 months,” said Geoffrey Hertel, the chief executive of Tetra. By Friday, Tetra had been able to send an 800-ton derrick barge it owns, the Arapaho, to the gulf to be used for platform repairs, Hertel said.

…The displacement of companies to Houston from New Orleans is an abrupt acceleration of a trend that has been going on for decades. Many large companies, particularly those in the energy business, have made that move over the years, leaving New Orleans more dependent on tourism and other service industries.

A surge of business activity in Houston might lift the fortunes of a city that is still struggling to recover from the collapse of Enron and two decades of job cuts in the energy industry.

Rising oil and natural gas prices in the last two years have strengthened the finances of Houston’s largest energy companies, but have done little to improve job prospects in the city, where the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent in July, compared with 5 percent nationally. During the last oil boom, in the 1970s, 150,000 jobs were created in the business of oilfield equipment, according to Barton Smith, director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston.

But since the 1980s, about 130,000 of those jobs have been lost as oil and natural gas exploration moved away, largely to West Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and companies were able to produce oilfield equipment more cheaply abroad.

One company that has exchanged New Orleans for Houston is Whitney Holding, the parent company of Whitney National Bank, founded in 1883 and the oldest operating bank in New Orleans. Another New Orleans oil exploration company, Energy Partners, said in a statement last week that it was also making Houston its temporary headquarters. Other companies are following suit, according to real estate brokers.
“It’s exploding,” said Steve Duplantis, senior managing director at CB Richard Ellis. “When I talk to owners of office buildings, they say people are not even negotiating. As tragic as it is for New Orleans, it is a boon for Houston.”
iht.com

Nice

San Antonio Times Editorial
Nothing could compare to the differences between the hip-hop celebrities at the MTV Video Music Awards recently and the masses of people wading through the chaos of New Orleans in the days that followed.

On one side, you had some of the best-coiffed, best-dressed and richest-fed beautiful people on the planet. On the other, you see people who haven’t looked in a mirror in days — and could care less because they may not have eaten in the same time.

…The disaster in New Orleans is bringing out all the normal complaints that the government could have done this or it should have done that. Why weren’t we better prepared for this storm? Why didn’t we build stronger levees? Why aren’t we doing more to help evacuees?

The short answer is that we could have done each of the things suggested. But contrary to the beliefs of some utopians and those who think that somehow this storm was part of a Halliburton conspiracy, we can’t take risk out of life. And we don’t have unlimited cash to prevent every potential disaster.

You want a stronger levee? Fine. Unfortunately, to pay for that, we will have to forgo rebuilding public schools. That’s not acceptable? Then I guess we could postpone that sports arena you needed to attract a major league team. Not good either? Well, I guess we need to “increase revenues,” which means raising taxes, which will slow down the economic growth that the city needs to create jobs.

So you make compromises.

BUSH MOM: EVERYONE WANTS TO MOVE TO TEXAS
“Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston,” Barbara Bush told NPR.

“What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this –this is working very well for them.”

O yes. Very well indeed.

…”There is nothing to correct wild reports that armed gangs have taken over the convention centre,” wrote Associated Press writer, Allen Breed.

“You can report them but you at least have to say they are unsubstantiated and not pass them off as fact,” said one Baltimore-based journalist.

“But nobody is doing that.”

Either way these rumours have had an effect.

Reports of the complete degradation and violent criminals running rampant in the Superdome suggested a crisis that both hastened the relief effort and demonised those who were stranded.

By the end of last week the media in Baton Rouge reported that evacuees from New Orleans were carjacking and that guns and knives were being seized in local shelters where riots were erupting.

The local mayor responded accordingly.

“We do not want to inherit the looting and all the other foolishness that went on in New Orleans,” Kip Holden was told the Baton Rouge Advocate.

“We do not want to inherit that breed that seeks to prey on other people.”

The trouble, wrote Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune is that “scarcely any of it was true – the police confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter”.

“There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes.”

Similarly when the first convoy of national guardsmen went into New Orleans approached the convention centre they were ordered to “lock and load”.

But when they arrived they were confronted not by armed mobs but a nurse wearing a T-shirt that read “I love New Orleans”.

“She ran down a broken escalator, then held her hands in the air when she saw the guns,” wrote the LA Times.

“We have sick kids up here!” she shouted.

“We have dehydrated kids! One kid with sickle cell!”
guardian.co.uk

Interview on Meet the Press with Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parrish

see it and weep